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Cloud Academy is proud to be a sponsor of the Microsoft Ignite Conference to be held September 24 – 28 in Orlando, Florida. This is Microsoft’s biggest event of the year and is a great way to stay up to date on how to get the most from Microsoft’s products. In this post, I’ll help you plan which of the multitude of Ignite sessions to attend if you’re focused on Azure.

To help you sift through all of the available sessions, Microsoft helpfully provides the MyIgnite Session Scheduler. However, when you first go there, it simply gives you a list of 1,526 sessions! There are a couple of ways to reduce it to a more manageable list. One way is to use the “Refine Results” button, which lets you filter based on criteria like product, level, and format. If you filter for Azure, it comes back with 593 sessions. That’s an improvement, but it’s still too many.

Another approach is to select “Learning Paths” from the “Discover Sessions” menu. These are curated lists based on role, such as Cloud Solution Architect, or topic area, such as Microsoft AI Solutions. If you’re interested in more than one area, though, then you’ll have to look through multiple paths.

Such a huge selection of choices can be overwhelming, so I’ll make some suggestions to get you started. I’ve focused on the hottest topics, especially artificial intelligence (AI), containers, microservices, and DevOps.

Monday, September 24

KEY01 – Vision Keynote, Satya Nadella, 9:00 AM – 10:00 AMSatya NadellaIn the four years since Satya Nadella took over as CEO, Microsoft has tripled in market value. Where is he planning to take the company next? Make sure you get to the conference on time to hear what Microsoft’s visionary leader has to say.

Tuesday, September 25

BRK2196 – Architect your app modernization journey with containers on Microsoft Azure, 10:45 AM – 12:00 PMGabe Monroy, Madhan Arumugam Ramakrishnan, Vaclav TurecekContainers are a great solution to improve the speed and efficiency of deploying your applications, but not every application can easily be moved to containers. Using demos and real-world examples, the presenters will explain the best scenarios for using containers and how to get started.

BRK2292 – AI: What to use, and when, 12:45 PM – 1:30 PMBuck WoodyAzure has a wide variety of artificial intelligence services, including Cognitive Services, Azure Machine Learning, HDInsight, Azure Batch AI, and many more. Buck Woody, an Applied Data Scientist, will go through all of them and show you which tools should be used for which situations.

Wednesday, September 26th

THR2321 – Top 5 ways to adopt AI in your Apps using Azure, 12:30 PM – 12:50 PMJulia WhiteIn this 15-minute show, Julia White, who leads product marketing for Microsoft Azure, will show you how to easily add AI to your apps. She will cover all five of the categories in Azure Cognitive Services, including vision, speech, language, knowledge, and search. This session will be filmed, so you could be part of the Microsoft Mechanics Live! studio audience.

BRK2027 – Build microservices applications with a serverless architecture, 3:15 PM – 4:00 PMGorka Madariaga NuñezAn application built with microservices has many advantages over a monolithic application, especially when it comes to maintenance. Microservices are often deployed using containers, but another option that’s growing in popularity is to use serverless functions. In this session, you will learn how to architect serverless microservices-based applications.

Thursday, September 27

BRK3384 – Best practices for protecting modern cloud application architectures,10:45 AM – 12:00 PMModern cloud application architectures are more distributed than older architectural models. This provides great benefits, but it makes securing those applications much more complicated. In this session, you will hear about modern security risks, how to have a security conversation with all of the relevant teams, and how to apply threat intelligence.

BRK2412 – An Azure DevOps Journey: Reshaping an enterprise from Infrastructure to Application-centric mindset, 4:00 PM – 5:15 PMDerrick Sharpe, John Fitch, Todd FoxNearly every organization seems to be adopting DevOps processes, with widely varying degrees of success. The DuPont Cloud Engineering Team had the challenge of not only adopting a DevOps culture but also moving its infrastructure to Azure at the same time. The team members will share their lessons learned and give advice for those who are attempting their own transformations.

Friday, September 28

BRK2392 – Master tooling for containers, 9:00 AM – 10:15 AMBaruch Sadogursky, Jessica DeenOne of the challenges with moving to a microservices architecture is implementing proper container orchestration. In this session, you will learn how to apply DevOps best practices and container tooling to your processes to make the transition easier. You will see how to do this using Kubernetes, the most popular container orchestrator.

Guy launched his first training website in 1995 and he's been helping people learn IT technologies ever since. He has been a sysadmin, instructor, sales engineer, IT manager, and entrepreneur. Guy’s passion is making complex technology easy to understand.

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